Tracking the Time Course of Spoken Word Recognition Using Eye Movements: Evidence for Continuous Mapping Models

Time Course of Frequency Effects in Spoken-Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye Movements

“…This suggests that between 200 and 500 ms, the cohort competitors were activated and competed with the target for recognition, until the acoustic information provided disambiguation. Note that this window is narrower that the one found in Allopenna et al (1998), which extended from 300 to 700 ms. This difference can be accounted for by the fact that the mean overlap between the target and cohort competitor was greater in the Allopenna et al study (3.38 phonemes) than in the present study (2.18 phonemes).…”

“…To minimize participants' prior exposure to the pictures, we departed from the procedure used in Allopenna et al (1998) in two ways. First, the set of pictures was not shown to the participants before the experiment.…”

“…Eye movements to objects in the visual scene have been found to be closely time-locked to referring expressions in the unfolding speech stream. Allopenna, Magnuson, and Tanenhaus (1998) explored the application of this technique to the study of spoken-word recognition. Participants were instructed to fixate a central cross and then followed a spoken instruction to move (using a computer mouse) one of four objects displayed on a computer screen (e.g., ''Look at the cross.…”

“…The assumption providing the link between lexical activation and eye movements is that the activation of the name of a picture influences the probability that a subject will shift attention to that picture and thus make a saccadic eye movement to fixate it. Allopenna et al (1998) showed that eye movements generated early in the target word were equally likely to result in fixations to the cohort competitor (e.g., beetle) and to the referent (e.g., beaker) and were more likely to result in fixations to these pictures than to distractor controls that were phonologically unrelated to the target word (e.g., carriage). Furthermore, the fixations over time to the target, the cohort competitor, and a rhyme competitor (e.g., speaker) closely matched functions generated by the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition, given a simple implementation of the hypothesis linking activation levels in TRACE to fixation probabilities over time.…”

Syntactic predictability in the recognition of carefully and casually produced speech.

“…There is ample evidence in the literature suggesting that phonological overlap among words increases lexical competition (e.g. Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998;Brouwer et al, 2012a;Luce & Pisoni, 1998;McQueen & Viebahn, 2007). We would therefore expect that a casual speaking style should increase lexical competition and slow down word recognition.…”